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zhte415

What I can think of the the UK, please add or disagree, perhaps there's also regional variation:

* Street - A road that traditionally had shops; may or may not today

* Road - Linking 2 places, may or may not have buildings

* Lane - Traditionally lined by bushes, winding, or otherwise 'small'

* Gardens - Limited to residential housing

* Court - Enclosed square

* Square - With a road/roads encircling it

* Causeway - Next to the sea, sure

* Avenue - Can recall a handful growing up but nothing made them distinguishable. Roads invariably as straight lines, other than the ones the Romans built, are an alien concept

* Boulevard - Never met a boulevard in the UK

* Parkway - Only one I can think of is Bristol Parkway, but I think of that as a train station

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Finally a domain where English is a lot more specific, ruining the joke on us Germans :P

Common road/street identifiers here include:

  - X-Y-Strasse  = e.g. "John Smith Street", bigger street
  - X-Weg        = e.g. "Falcon Road", smaller street, probably more rural, but hard to tell
  - Y-Gasse      = e.g. "Market Alley", smaller street, probably more urban, but hard to tell
  - X-Allee      = e.g "Poplar Alley", it has trees on both sides
  - X-Ring/Bogen = really only circular roads, not so common

And of course stuff like "XYZ-Platz" (Place/Square) and when there's water around, "XYZ-Damm" (Dike)

I think my point is that 90% use Strasse/Weg/Platz and only 10% combined are all the rest - or I am totally oblivious to the rules, but afaik I've never seen anything like naming them different based on direction or hard criteria for buildings around (exception is "Allee")

NB: I used hyphenation in my examples to better distinguish, this is only the correct form for most given names. e.g. it would "Johann-Schmidt-Strasse", but written in one word (e.g. "Falkenweg" for "Falcon Road") and in 2 words for place names, e.g. "Berliner Strasse" for "Berlin Street").

* Street

Doesn't need shops, this is the default word within any built-up area (even a village centre).

* Square - With a road/roads encircling it

No, this would be a paved area usually outside significant buildings. Often contained a market.

* Market - the market square, or the streets at its sides

* Causeway

That's a road to an island that floods at high tide.

* Mews -- houses that used to be stables

* Circus -- roads joining with a circular "square" (Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus).

Boulevard, avenue and parkway tend to suggest imported American terms for places under 80 years old.

* Parade -- small shops in a 20th century development

* Hill -- obvious

* Gate -- either a city gate, or cognate to the Norse word for street (c.f. Danish gade).

* Terrace, drive, crescent, esplanade, villas, walk, approach, ...

* Drove - Used for bringing livestock to market. Left over from agricultural times.

Avenues are straight paths or roads with trees on either side.

Some Scots ones:

- Loan

- Close

- Brae

Any clue as to what these signify? Close I think I know.

A brae is a hill/slope, close is a narrow lane running off a high street. A loan I had to look up and this sounds plausible:

"A "loaning" is a piece of uncultivated ground where cows are milked. A 'loan' is the path leading to said place."

A close is an alleyway off which one or more doors to residential tenements open. Alternative names are entry, court, and wynd, with some nuances: a court is more likely to open up into a courtyard, and a wynd more likely to be a means of getting from A to B, rather than just somewhere people live.

Just though of another one: "vennel" - which I thought was just The Vennel in Edinburgh but which actually seems to just be an example of a vennel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vennel

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